


The Most Bloody Boring Hundred Years on God's, Excuse His French, Earth

by russian_blue



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Historical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 19:37:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7374706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/russian_blue/pseuds/russian_blue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"One of the nice things about Time, Crowley always said, was that it was steadily taking him further away from the fourteenth century, the most bloody boring hundred years on God's, excuse his French, Earth."</p><p>Or, how a demon can possibly get bored during a century that features the Black Death AND the start of the Hundred Years' War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Most Bloody Boring Hundred Years on God's, Excuse His French, Earth

**Author's Note:**

> There were some seriously unpleasant things that happened during the fourteenth century. Be warned that they are referenced herein, and the tone of canon being what it is, they are not really given the gravity they would ordinarily deserve.

**1312: Pharos**

The most annoying thing was, it had started off so _well_.

Fine, okay, so that business with the Franco-Flemish War wasn't anything particularly new. Wars had stopped being original about five thousand years ago, and murder, well, murder was as old as Cain and Abel. But Crowley still appreciated style, and the Bruges Matins had been a beauty. Two thousand dead, in a single night! And the shibboleth, that was a nice touch, a bunch of sleepy French soldiers trying to pronounce some Flemish words to keep from being identified as foreigners -- really, he ought to ask around and find out who had invented the Flemish language. Whoever it was deserved a commendation, or to be more precise, a reprieve from the alternative*.

But the war petered out a few years later without any more massacres poetically named after liturgical events, and after that . . . nothing.

"I've got to find something to do," he said, pacing restlessly.

"Start another war?" Aziraphale suggested.

The angel was only trying to be helpful. After all, he couldn't be expected to thwart evil wiles if there weren't any wiles around to thwart. But Crowley scowled and kicked a stone off the rubble that had, until nine years before, been the Lighthouse of Alexandria. "Was it your side who did this, or mine?"

Aziraphale blinked, nonplussed by the question. "Did what?"

"The earthquake." Crowley gestured at the ruins. They were still recognizable as a lighthouse, but only just.

"Oh." Aziraphale thought for a moment. "I'm not sure. Mine, possibly. Pagan structure and all that. They want Seven Wonders of their own, you know; there's been a petition and everything."

Crowley kicked another stone off into the sea. There was something wrong with the world, he reflected, when angels went around destroying perfectly good buildings out of jealousy. That ought to be the work of _his_ side. But that was the ineffable plan for you: it produced effing jerks.

"Not another war," Crowley said, gazing out across the Mediterranean. "So many years starting with the number thirteen. It isn't what you'd call a good omen, is it? I need to come up with something special, something worthy of this century. So that when I look back on it a thousand years from now, I can say, the fourteenth century, now _that_ was an era to remember."

Aziraphale said, "I'll do my best to stop you." He was less than convincing.

Crowley grinned. "Just try and keep up."

* Crowley's side was not exactly known for handing out rewards. ^

***

**1349: London**

It was going _all wrong_.

"This was your doing, wasn't it," Crowley said in accusation. "Your side's, I mean."

Aziraphale looked shamefaced and scuffed one toe against the worn floorboards of the abandoned house. They'd needed a quiet place to talk, and the red cross painted on the front door was better than any _Go Away_ sign. A rat sat in the middle of the room like it owned the place -- which, for all intents and purposes, it did. The angel said, "It, er. May have been. Nothing like a good bit of plague to bring out the piety, they said. But I was against it from the start," he added hastily.

It had all the hallmarks of something that had gone through too many heavenly hands. One lower-ranking member of an obscure angelic choir gets the idea of unleashing a plague. His superior decides to take the notion and scale it up. Rinse and repeat, and the next thing you know, half of Europe is covered in buboes.

Oh, it brought out the piety. And some other things as well.

"I would think this was right up your alley!" Aziraphale added, as if trying to find a silver lining in a funeral shroud. "People are terrified. Terrified people do all kinds of dreadful things."

"Terrified people are _predictable_ ," Crowley said, scathingly. "Plague breaks out. Pray to God! If that doesn't work, flagellate yourself! If that doesn't work, kill some Jews!"

He was supposed to be in favour of that kind of thing. Any number of his fellow demons were having a fine old time of it, whipping people into a frenzy against anybody who made an easy target. Crowley had lost his taste for it, though. There was no artistry to those tactics, just a lot of pointless violence. Just more people dead, which meant that many fewer people around to tempt.

That was the heart of it. He wanted to do some _tempting_. Something subtle, something that could worm its way into people's minds and plant seeds that would grow into glorious trees of evil. This scorched-earth approach mostly just sickened him.

Admitting that, however, would buy him swift passage Down Below, where he'd be demoted to some menial task. Pushing all those people who perpetrated massacres into the river of boiling blood in the Seventh Circle, probably; some overly clever Italian had written an elaborate description of Hell a few decades before, and the Dukes who were Crowley's overlords had decided to redecorate. They'd been making noises in his general direction lately, the sort of grumbling that meant they were dissatisfied with his performance. Can't just coast along on your first act of evil, they said, no matter how much of a doozy it was. Have to come up with something fresh.

These thoughts always made Crowley uncomfortable. He distracted himself by asking in an accusing tone, "Well, what have _you_ been doing?"

Aziraphale puffed his chest out proudly. Had his wings been visible, he would have looked like a smug pigeon. "I inspired a priest, who convinced all the people in his village to stay instead of fleeing when plague appeared among them."

"And what happened to them?"

The angel deflated. "Well, they . . . they all died. But they didn't spread the plague to their neighbours, so that was good."

It was good. And it said something about this century that Crowley had to file "they all died of plague" under _GOOD_ in his mental ledger.

A church bell tolled outside. Another person dead. He could hear chanting through the boarded-up windows, probably a psalm, it was all psalms these days, nobody sang anything else. Piety and murder; that was all he had to choose from anymore. There was a war going on between England and France, showed no signs of stopping any time this century, and he couldn't bring himself to care. Boring, boring, it was all so bloody _boring_. When did good and evil get so predictable?

"I'm going to clear out for a bit," he announced abruptly. "Wander the world. Get some fresh ideas*."

Aziraphale lit up like a stained-glass window in full sunlight. He actually radiated light: what they would make of that on the street outside, Crowley didn't know, except that it would probably encourage them to keep on singing. He glared at Aziraphale, who guiltily dimmed himself. "I, er," the angel said. "Could go with you. Probably should. Keep an eye on you and all that; wouldn't want you to go tempting people without proper supervision. There's that new Nahua city we could take a look at, across the ocean. Or India. Or China -- would you believe I've never got round to China? Bit embarrassing; it's only been there for three thousand years."

"Sure, China," Crowley said vaguely. He was debating the merits of putting on some horns and a pitchfork and going out to scare the singers in the street. "Anyplace has got to be better than here."

* The Religious Creativity Non-Limitation Pact between Crowley's people and the other side meant that, while everybody still got weighed on the same moral scales in the end, at least they didn't all have to sing the same blessed psalms everywhere. ^

***

**1398: Mainz**

They stood over the cradle, the angel and the demon, and grinned at each other. A faint air of Chinese incense still clung to them both.

"Ground rules," Crowley said. "Neither of us gets to appear to him in person."

"Oh, of course not," Aziraphale hastened to agree. "Indirect influence only." He stopped and thought for a moment. "Probably best if we don't appear to any immediate family members, either."

Crowley allowed that this was fair. "But his friends, his teachers --"

"-- his priest --"

"They're all legitimate targets."

"Of course."

There was a warm glow in the vicinity of where Crowley's heart ought to have been, if he'd had a heart. He almost wished he could go down to Hell and get a permit for Wang Zhen to leave. Bi Sheng too, while he was at it. Sure, Crowley had every intention of turning what they had wrought to glorious, insidious, evil ends. But he was so grateful to them, it felt like they deserved something better than eternity among the virtuous pagans. Unfortunately, That Place had been a good deal stricter about granting permits ever since Jesus staged that raid between His crucifixion and His resurrection.

He could not resist rubbing his hands. Aziraphale looked at them meaningfully. "Patience," the angel said. "He's only a baby. It will be years before we see anything from this."

Years. Years in which it would stop being the God-blessed fourteenth century, and become the fifteenth. Crowley could not think of anything better than that.

No, that was a lie. He could think of something a great deal better: the idea they'd found in China, which they would subtly implant into the mind of this little German baby, where it would flower into a tree -- a tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

He hadn't felt this excited since the garden.

They laid their hands on the baby, the angel and the demon, and whispered their blessing and their curse to him. _Invention._ An idea that could be used to spread religion and heresy alike, from the highest levels of society down to the poorest, plague-decimated masses. It might start with a Bible, but it would end somewhere else entirely.

Little Johannes Gutenberg squirmed, woke up, and began to babble.

**Author's Note:**

> The moment I saw your letter mention historical periods, my mind immediately went to a question I'd always wondered about: how Crowley could possibly call the fourteenth century "boring" when it was filled with so many horrible things of a type that ought to have been right up a demon's alley. The only explanation I could find was that after so much time on Earth, he found those evils banal and repetitive. Which, of course, made me start pondering what he would consider interesting -- and that led me to Gutenberg. Who didn't get going with that "printing press" thing until the fifteenth century, but he was born in 1398. And then I thought about Bi Sheng, who invented a porcelain form of movable type in the mid-eleventh century, and Wang Zhen, who came up with a wooden version in the early fourteenth century. This is the result!
> 
> (And as one of my friends pointed out, by the twentieth century Aziraphale is running a bookshop. So apparently Crowley quite thoroughly tempted his angelic friend, leading him down the primrose path of the printed word.)
> 
> The Lighthouse at Alexandria was destroyed by three successive earthquakes, in 956, 1303, and 1323. That left only two of the Seven Wonders standing, and more earthquakes did for the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus a few decades later. Coincidence? I think not.


End file.
